


Four Letter Words

by DHW



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 08:03:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19080880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHW/pseuds/DHW
Summary: There are some things a demon just doesn't like to admit.





	Four Letter Words

**Author's Note:**

> The wonderful **RnameR** has written a response to this fic. You can read _The human condition: a four letter word_ [HERE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19236319)

Nice is a four letter word. Crowley doesn’t like four letter words. They come with connotations. Expectations. He doesn’t remove the paint from Aziraphale’s jacket because he is _nice_. Nor is it the reason he allows the humans playing soldiers outside to miraculously escape every piece of not-so-friendly fire. He does those things because he wants to. Because he can. 

Crowley is a demon; he isn’t nice by both definition and speciation. Nice cosmic entities didn’t have a hand in the rise of the Influencer, nor were they the reason pacer trains never turned up on time. They didn’t consult for the DVLA, invent CAPTCHAs, or leave comments on the Mail Online. And they most certainly didn’t do favours for friends. 

He isn’t nice, because being nice is almost like being _good_ , and it’s a slippery, four-letter slope from thereon out. 

Hurt. Hope. Wish. Luck. Idea. Hate. Fate. Fuck. All four letters. All words he tells himself he could do without. Especially the last. 

Fuck is a four letter word he thinks about more often than he’d like. It’s versatile, he’d give it that. A word with a hundred-and-one tones and inflections. The ‘Fuck!' yelled upon stubbing one’s toe on the sideboard is so very different to that uttered in joyous surprise, and different again to that whispered in a lover’s bed. It is always that latter usage that poses the problem. 

Demons are not like humans; they were not made for that particular brand of intimacy. Or for any intimacy at all, come to that. 

And yet…

There are ideas, thoughts centered on four-letters, that he simply can’t get out of his head. Ones that have haunted him for millenia. Thoughts that require more effort than most of his kind are willing to give, and yet appear to come so easily to God’s other creations.

 _Fuck,_ he thinks. 

And thinks. 

And thinks. 

And his thoughts go like this: 

The feel of soft skin on his, golden curls threaded between his fingers. The scent of dusty books and soap and stardust, permeating what little air remains between this moment and the next. A thigh against his. A hand gripping his wrist. An Angel beneath him, whispering his name between gasped breaths, and his mind almost consumed by the sheer pleasure of it. 

The perversity of the idea would be enough to bring him to the edge here and now, if he allows himself to think about it (which he does, if only for a second). A Demon and an Angel, not-quite-so definitive articles entwined on silk bed sheets, fighting a war of their very own. 

But he doesn’t want to fuck Aziraphale. He never has. Not in all their 6,000 years. He’s never wanted to because _fuck_ has four sodding letters and madness waiting in the spaces between them. Not to mention that four letter words like that often lead to deeply troubling new ones. 

Like ‘love’, for example. Love is a four letter word, and he’s not in love. He’s never been in love. Not, he is pleased to say, for a single second. Not even with a singular someone. Besides, he’s very sure that these four letter feelings he isn’t having are not in the least bit mutual. It’s simply not the done thing. 

Angels and Demons are a respectable five-letter chalk and six-letter cheese. Aziraphale is the north pole to his south. The apple to his orange (not to get all biblical about it. Heaven forfend!). 

The funny thing is, _liar_ is a four letter word, too, and it’s a word that fits as well as the others. 

Not, of course, that he would admit it.


End file.
